Various bacteria

Category archives for Various bacteria

This is the third of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Mary Egan. Murine typhus has been in the news recently in Austin, TX, where in May of this year, two people were found to be positive and one died. This rings a number of alarm bells for me, since I live in Texas, and specifically in…

This is the second of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Eileen Ball. The beauty of dogs and cats as companions is that we don’t have to raise them to go out into the world and be successful. As pet parents we can set the household “rules” according to what works for us and get on with…

I recently gave a talk to a group here in Iowa City, emphasizing just how frequently we share microbes. It was a noontime talk over a nice lunch, and of course I discussed how basically we humans are hosts to all kinds of organisms, and analysis of our “extended microbiome” shows that we share not…

Just a quick post as I’m in end-of-semester hell. Via Maryn McKenna on Twitter, the CDC has released a report of Campylobacter illnesses due to not food consumption, but because of castrating lambs. With their teeth. On June 29, 2011, the Wyoming Department of Health was notified of two laboratory-confirmed cases of Campylobacter jejuni enteritis…

I’ve blogged previously on a few U.S. studies which investigated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in raw meat products (including chicken, beef, turkey, and pork). This isn’t just a casual observation as one who eats food–I follow this area closely as we also have done our own pair of food sampling investigations here in Iowa, and will…

While “flesh-eating infections” caused by the group A streptococcus (Streptococcus pyogenes) may grab more headlines today, one hundred and fifty years ago, the best known and most dreaded form of streptococcal infection was scarlet fever. Simply hearing the name of this disease, and knowing that it was present in the community, was enough to strike…

Part One It appears that the E. coli O104 sproutbreak is starting to wind down, with more than 3,500 cases diagnosed to date and 39 deaths. Though sprouts remain the key source of the bacterium, a recent report also documents that human carriers helped to spread the organism (via H5N1 blog). In this case, it…

I left off yesterday with the initial discovery of “Vero toxin,” a toxin produced by E. coli (also called “Shiga toxin” or “Shiga-like toxin”). Though this may initially seem unconnected to hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), the discovery of this cytotoxin paved the way for a clearer understanding of the etiology of this syndrome, as well…

As I mentioned yesterday, the epidemiology of hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) was murky for several decades after it was first defined in the literature in 1955. In the ensuing decades, HUS was associated with a number of infectious agents, leading to the general belief that it was a “multifactorial disease”–one that had components of genetics…